Raj Ratwani, PhD, serves as the Vice President of Scientific Affairs for MedStar Health Research Institute (MHRI) and the director of the MedStar Health National Center for Human Factors in Healthcare. He is also a professor at the Georgetown University School of Medicine.
As vice president, Dr. Ratwani contributes to the strategy, growth and administration of research across MedStar Health, with a focus on working closely with organizational leaders and investigators to translate research results into practice. He supervises and mentors investigators to support research activities, identify new areas of research funding and enhance MHRI’s reputation as a leading research organization. Dr. Ratwani leads strategy development for MHRI to support effective dissemination of research outputs.
As director of the MedStar Health National Center for Human Factors in Healthcare, Dr. Ratwani oversees the Center’s vision and strategy and has overall responsibility for Center activities. He is also an active applied researcher serving as principal investigator on numerous grants and contracts, including fiver research project grant (R01) awards from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which are among the most prestigious grants. Raj has expertise in health information technology, usability and safety, interruptions and workflow, data visualization, and modeling. He holds a doctorate in human factors and applied cognition and was a National Research Council post-doctoral fellow at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory.
Research Interests
Dr. Ratwani's research interests include
- Human factors engineering
- Cognition, perception and memory
- Prediction of human error and error avoidance methods
- Effect of interruption, resumption and multi-tasking on worker proficiency and accuracy
- Human-computer interactionsReal-time error prediction
- Data visualization and representation
- Quantitative analysis methods
Selected Research
Predicting and Preventing Skill-Based Errors Using Eye Movements
Dr. Ratwani's work with the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory on understanding the reasons errors occur in the workplace resulted in the development of proven real-time prediction techniques that can predict errors before they occur. Using eye movements as a measure of behavior, he developed mathematical models that are used in a real-time eye gaze system to predict procedural errors. Dr. Ratwani and a colleague have published an article detailing this work in Human-Computer Interaction (2011;26:205-245).
Interruptions, Resumption and Multi-tasking
In this work, Dr. Ratwani studied how people resume tasks following an interruption and methods to reduce the cost of interruptions. He found that by training people how to deal with interruptions, time to task resumption was shortened. This work was conducted for the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and has been presented at meetings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.
Graphs and Complex Visualizations
In this work, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied (2008;14:36-49), Dr. Ratwani and colleagues focused on the cognitive processes people use to obtain information that is presented graphically. This research extended current graph comprehension theories to account for information integration. The authors developed design principles to facilitate the processing of complex graphs and examine specific aspects of graphs, including color, which facilitate human processing. This work was conducted with researchers at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and George Mason University.
Research Areas
- Health Services/Quality/Outcomes